In stores and in industrial applications, it long has been customary to affix to merchandise and other articles, or their outer wrappers or other containers, a document such as a ticket or tag having marked thereon information pertaining to the article, e.g., size, price, a number identifying what the merchandise is for inventory control purposes, etc. To provide for subsequent automatic data processing of such documents, it has also been customary to include some or all of the information on the document in the form of encoded arrangements of punched holes, in addition to having the information printed in conventional human readable form.
It has recently been proposed that instead of having the automatically readable information applied to the documents in the form of punched holes, the information instead be printed on the documents as optical character recognition (OCR) characters, i.e., characters which are both human readable as conventional characters but which are specially configured so as to be also machine readable by suitable OCR automatic reading apparatus. Such proposals and standards and specifications for such documents and OCR characters are set forth in the publication "Voluntary Retail Identification Standard Specification-A-1974" dated Sept. 12, 1974 and issued by the National Retail Merchants Association of New York, N.Y. The foregoing publication is in part based upon the publication "American National Standard Character Set and Print Quality for Optical Character Recognition, (OCR-A), X3.17-1974" issued in 1974 by the American National Standards Institute of New York, N.Y. Both the foregoing publications are hereby incorporated by reference into the disclosure of the present patent application.
The tags may be a one-part tag, or a plural-part tag where each of the plural parts may have, at least in part, identical information marked thereon. In the case of a plural-part tag, in use in a store it is customary for the tag parts to be torn off from each other. This usually results in the torn-off parts having a fuzzy, non-clean edge. Additionally, in use the tags often develop a curl and become bent, wrinkled, and otherwise deformed or mutilated. This makes it difficult to feed them accurately in reading and other systems in which the tags are handled.
The following U.S. Pat. Nos. disclose prior art document handling systems: 2,977,114; 3,051,309; 3,101,942; 3,151,863; 3,791,516.